Ray J performs onstage during ONE Musicfest 2025 at Piedmont Park on October 25, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Julia Beverly/Getty Images)
Ray J has been arrested following an alleged domestic dispute that was reportedly livestreamed.
The singer, songwriter and actor, 44, whose real name is Willie Norwood and is the younger brother of multi-platinum recording artist Brandy, was arrested Thursday morning by Los Angeles Police after the agency received a call reporting a domestic dispute.
Police told ABC News that a 911 caller reported a possible custody dispute and said Ray J was possibly armed.
He was booked at LAPD’s Van Nuys Station. His bail was listed for $50,000.
Good Morning America has reached out to attorneys and a representative listed for Ray J for comment.
Reports from celebrity outlets including TMZ said that the 44-year-old singer was livestreaming on Instagram about having “the worst Thanksgiving in the f****** world.”
According to reports about the livestream, Ray J allegedly grabbed a handgun from the table and argued with Princess Love Norwood over the custody of their children.
Ray J is known for his hit songs “Wait a Minute” (feat. Lil’ Kim), his 2005 single “One Wish” and his 2008 song “Sexy Can I.”
According to People, Ray J and Princess Love married in August 2016 and since then, have filed for divorce four times.
A docket from a Los Angeles courthouse states that a petition for a divorce for the couple was filed in February 2024. The divorce appears to be ongoing.
Ray J and Princess Love, who also starred in Love & Hip Hop: Hollywood together from 2014 to 2019, share two children together: Melody Love Norwood, 7, and Epik Ray Norwood, 5.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump said he will “permanently pause migration” from some countries following the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., earlier this week.
In a post on his social media platform late Thursday, Trump did not specify which countries the pause would affect, saying it would apply to “Third World Countries.”
In June, Trump issued a proclamation banning travel to the U.S. from 12 countries, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, and imposing travel restrictions on several others.
In the post on Thursday, Trump also listed a number of actions he said the U.S. would take, though it’s not yet clear how the Trump administration plans to accomplish them.
He said the U.S. would “terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
The suspect in Wednesday’s shooting, which claimed the life of one National Guard member and left the other in critical condition, is 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal.
Officials say Lakanwal came to the U.S. in 2021 during the Biden administration. He was granted asylum in April 2025 under Trump, according to multiple law enforcement sources.
In Afghanistan, the suspect was involved with the Zero Unit, working closely with the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command, according to sources familiar with the investigation. The suspect was a trusted member of that team, which went after U.S. counterterrorism targets, according to sources.
Trump has vowed an immigration crackdown following the shooting, saying Wednesday the attack “underscores the greatest national security threat facing our nation.”
In the past, Democrats and immigration advocates have pushed back against the president’s immigration restrictions, including on asylum seekers, contending that he has exaggerated national security concerns and turned away millions of families in need.
Trump ordered National Guard troops to Washington this summer. He has also ordered members of the National Guard to other Democrat-led cities such as Chicago and Portland, Oregon.
(LONDON) — A month after a massacre that was reported in a war-ravaged city of Sudan shocked the world, the United Nations and others are warning that there’s nowhere near enough humanitarian aid being provided to the tens of thousands of residents who fled.
Many thousands more are believed to still be trapped inside El Fasher, the besieged capital of the Darfur region in Sudan’s west. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the powerful Sudanese paramilitary group that took over the city last month, is allegedly preventing people from leaving and stopping lifesaving supplies from coming in.
The U.N. Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, Denise Brown, who returned from the Darfur region last week, said the amount of aid they were able to currently provide to the survivors from El Fasher wasn’t close to what is needed.
“We do not have enough food, we do not have enough of anything,” Brown told ABC News in a telephone interview last Friday. “The international community has to step up.”
Sudan has been embroiled in a brutal civil war since 2023, when fighting erupted in the capital of Khartoum between forces loyal to rival military leaders. It was the culmination of weeks of tensions between Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, the commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces, and Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, the head of the RSF. The two men were once allies who had jointly orchestrated a military coup in 2021 that dissolved Sudan’s power-sharing government and derailed its short-lived transition to democracy, following the ousting of a long-time dictator in 2019.
Officially formed in 2013, the RSF evolved out of the notorious Janjaweed militias used by the Sudanese government to crush an armed rebellion in the Darfur region in the 2000s. Sudanese forces and the Janjaweed were accused of committing war crimes in Darfur.
Ultimately, the International Criminal Court charged Sudan’s former dictatorial ruler Omar al-Bashir with genocide. The reported atrocities in El Fasher are seen by experts as a continuation of that genocide.
Sudan’s civil war has since become “one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century,” according to the U.N., with tens of thousands of people killed and millions more displaced. In January, the U.S. Department of State said both sides had committed war crimes and concluded “that members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan,” citing the systematic murder of civilians, sexual violence and denial of humanitarian aid for civilians caught in the conflict.
El Fasher was the last stronghold of the Sudanese army and its allied militias in the wider Darfur region, under total siege for over a year and a half before falling to the RSF in late October. At least 80,000 people are estimated to have fled El Fasher and sought refuge in a massive displacement camp in the town of Tawila, with most making the 35-mile journey on foot. The camp was already home to around 600,000 displaced people, according to humanitarian aid workers.
Many of those from El Fasher bring with them horrific accounts of atrocities allegedly carried out by the RSF, including summary executions, gang rape and killing anyone who tries to flee the city. The U.N. believes as many as 50,000 people may still be trapped in El Fasher, considered to be detained there by the RSF, according to Brown.
An analysis of satellite imagery by the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab found evidence of continuing mass killings in the days after the RSF took control of El Fasher, with blood-stained sand and piles of bodies apparently visible from space. Moreover, a U.N.-backed monitor for food security declared earlier this month that famine had taken hold in El Fasher and surrounding areas.
Brown said the U.N.’s capability to respond to the crisis is limited by a yawning shortfall in funding from countries and donors.
“We are 28% funded,” she told ABC News. “So what would the international community like me to do to respond to the needs of the people who are traumatized?”
Despite having less than a third of the funding needed, Brown said: “We’re one of the best funded humanitarian responses in the world, at 28%, and there have been cuts across the board by donors. So it’s a cumulative effect of those cuts.”
The United States has long been the U.N.’s largest donor but, under President Donald Trump, has recently withdrawn from several U.N. agencies, frozen funding for others and clawed back $ 1 billion in previously approved funds for the U.N.
“Everyone is calling and asking how can we help? Well, here is how you can help,” Brown told ABC News. “Money is not the solution to what’s going on in Sudan, but money is surely going to help our humanitarian response.”
In particular, Brown said, the U.N. was currently unable to provide enough care or psychological support for women and girls in the Tawila camp who had suffered sexual violence. The U.N. has hundreds of documented cases of gang rape and other sexual violence in the Darfur region, but that is believed to be just “the tip of the iceberg,” according to Brown.
The U.N. has been trying to negotiate with the RSF to allow humanitarian access into El Fasher — so far, unsuccessfully.
The head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Tom Fletcher, traveled with Brown to Darfur last week to meet with the RSF, requesting complete access throughout Sudan for humanitarian operations and providing the U.N.’s conditions for such an agreement.
“We need safe passage. We want a small team, no presence of any armed militia,” Brown told ABC News. “We need to go to the sites which we have identified as important. We need to be able to evacuate the injured and access to detainees.”
(NEW YORK) — Online shoppers set a record high on Thanksgiving, paving the way for gangbusters performance on Black Friday, Adobe data showed.
Digital spending on Thanksgiving jumped 5% from a year earlier, totaling $6.4 billion and exceeding Adobe’s expectations, the firm said.
The company also expects Black Friday shoppers to set a new record, outpacing last year’s total by more than 8%.
Adobe attributed the strong performance on Thanksgiving to better-than-anticipated discounts, especially for electronics. Discounts also touched an array of products from furniture to appliances to toys.
“Given the strength of Thanksgiving deals, Adobe is adjusting its discount forecast for the big shopping days coming up,” Adobe said in a statement to ABC News. “Deals are now expected to be on par with the elevated levels seen in the last holiday shopping season.”
A surge in the popularity of AI retail assistants also contributed to the nationwide shopping spree, Adobe said. AI-driven traffic to online sellers soared 725% compared to last year, the firm said, stemming primarily from chatbots designed to aid consumers.
Shoppers who arrived at a retail website from an AI service were 54% more likely to make a purchase than those who did not, Adobe said.
“The magnitude of discounts was the big story on Thanksgiving yesterday, as retailers leaned into delivering great deals to drive consumer demand online,” Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, told ABC News in a statement.
“This was further propped up by impulse-led mobile shopping and the use of generative AI which assisted shoppers in locating the best deals, two trends that helped deliver higher-than-expected overall spend on Thanksgiving,” Pandya added.
The early returns for the holiday shopping season arrive at a wobbly moment for the U.S. economy.
Inflation has picked up in recent months, putting price increases a full percentage point above the Fed’s target of 2%. Meanwhile, hiring has slowed, posing a risk of an economic double-whammy known as “stagflation.”
Alongside those headwinds, consumer spending among middle- and low-income Americans has slowed, triggering warnings from restaurant giants such as McDonald’s and Chipotle. A report this month showed consumer sentiment has fallen to its lowest point since a peak of pandemic-era inflation in 2022, University of Michigan data showed.
Retailers hope shoppers defy these trends over the holiday season, when spending typically surges. The outcome could hold significant stakes for the wider economy, since consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of U.S. economic activity.
(WASHINGTON) — The suspect in the “targeted” shooting of two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., will now face charges upgraded to first-degree murder after President Donald Trump announced the death of one of the victims late Thursday, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said Friday.
“There are certainly many more charges to come, but we are upgrading the initial charges of assault to murder in the first degree,” Pirro said Friday morning on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”
The suspected gunman, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was previously charged with three counts of assault with the intent to kill while armed and criminal possession of a weapon, officials said during a press conference on Thursday.
Lakanwal is accused of firing at two National Guard members, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom and 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, on Wednesday afternoon.
The suspect allegedly “opened fire without provocation, ambush style,” struck one of the victims, leaned over and shot the individual again, before firing at the other National Guard member “several times,” Pirro said on Thursday.
Trump announced on Thursday evening that Beckstrom, an Army specialist, had died.
“She’s just passed away. She’s no longer with us. She’s looking down at us right now,” Trump said of Beckstrom. “Her parents are with her. It’s just happened.”
Andrew Wolfe, a U.S. Air Force staff sergeant, remains in critical condition.
“The other young man is fighting for his life,” Trump said. “He’s in very bad shape. He’s fighting for his life.”
The shooting took place around 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday near the Farragut West Metro station.
Pirro said the suspect, an Afghan national, allegedly drove from Washington state to target the guard members, opening fire with a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver.
The suspect’s motive is still unclear, according to officials.
A search warrant was conducted at the suspect’s home in Bellingham, Washington, where officials found “numerous electronic devices,” FBI Director Kash Patel said on Thursday.
Patel also noted the FBI received confirmation from the Department of Defense and CIA “that the subject had a relationship in Afghanistan with partner forces.”
“We are fully investigating that aspect of his background as well, to include any known associates that are either overseas or here in the United States of America,” Patel said.
Lakanwal is believed to be from Afghanistan and came to the United States in 2021 under the Biden administration, law enforcement sources said. He applied for asylum in 2024 and was granted asylum in April, likely after being vetted, under the Trump administration, according to the sources.
The National Guard was deployed to the nation’s capital as part of Trump’s federal takeover of the city and crime crackdown in August. According to the most recent update, there were 2,188 National Guard personnel assigned to D.C.
A day before the shooting, during the traditional turkey pardoning at the White House, Trump touted his administration’s takeover of D.C. streets. He said it was “one of our most unsafe places anywhere in the United States. It is now considered a totally safe city.”
“You could walk down any street in Washington and you’re going to be just fine. And I want to thank the National Guard. I want to thank you for the job you’ve done here is incredible,” Trump said at the event.
(LONDON) — A woman has died, and a man was seriously injured after a shark attack off Australia’s east coast, police said Friday.
Emergency services were called to a beach at Crowdy Bay, about 40 miles south of Port Macquarie in New South Wales, around 6:30 a.m. Thursday after reports that two people had been bitten, according to New South Wales Police.
A witness helped the victims before paramedics arrived, but the woman, who was believed to be 25, died at the scene, police said.
“The 26-year-old man sustained serious injuries and was airlifted to the John Hunter Hospital where he remains in a serious but stable condition,” police said.
Authorities said the pair are believed to have been visiting from Switzerland, though neither victim has been publicly identified.
The beach remained closed Friday as police continued their investigation, and a report is being prepared by the coroner.
(NEW YORK) — Authorities on the Caribbean island of Tobago say they’re investigating the death of an American man who was found fatally stabbed on Wednesday.
The victim was identified as Christopher Brown, 42, of Silverthorne, Colorado, the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service told ABC News.
Brown was having dinner with friends at Marguarite’s Local Cuisine in the seaside village of Castara on Wednesday and accompanied the group when they went to a second restaurant and bar nearby to have drinks afterward, police said.
He then apparently left the second location, telling his friends that he was going to buy marijuana, and walked along a main road in Castara, according to the police report.
Police received a report just after 10:30 p.m. local time of a “motionless body bearing a stab wound to the back” on Depot Road in Castara, the report states. When they arrived at the scene, they observed several wounds on the man’s body, as well as a “metallic object” protruding from his back.
“The Division of Tourism, Culture, Antiquities and Transportation is profoundly saddened and deeply disturbed by the tragic murder of a foreign national in the peaceful community of Castara,” the agency said in a statement. “The Division strongly condemns this horrific act of violence and extends our heartfelt condolences to the family, friends and loved ones of the deceased during this unimaginably difficult time,” a statement from the agency read.
One suspect is in custody, but they have not been charged at this time, police said.
(NEW YORK) — New York Jets player Kris Boyd is back in the hospital days after he was released for treatment of a gunshot wound.
Boyd, 29, had been released from the hospital after he was shot in Midtown Manhattan on Nov. 16 but returned on Wednesday due to “health issues,” he wrote in an Instagram story.
“Please bare [sic] with me, I haven’t been in communication much,” Boyd wrote. “I was released but had to return to the hospital due to my health issues.”
Boyd then thanked everyone who has prayed and reached out to him with well wishes.
The nature around his hospitalization was unclear.
Boyd was shot in the abdomen at 2 a.m. on Nov. 16 in front of the Sei Less restaurant on West 38th Street in Manhattan, the NYPD confirmed to ABC News. He then underwent multiple treatments at Bellevue Hospital for the bullet lodged in his lung.
The shooting appeared to have stemmed from an exchange of works between Boyd, who was with two other Jets players and a friend, and another group “chirping” about their clothes, police sources told ABC News.
On Nov. 19, three days after the shooting, Boyd posted a photo of himself to his Instagram story, saying he was beginning to breathe on his own.
“I’m coming along, starting to breathe on my own now,” Boyd wrote. “Sincerely appreciate everyone!”
Last week, NYPD detectives identified a possible suspect, but no arrests have been made in connection with the shooting.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump renewed his pledge to crackdown on immigration following the shooting of two National Guard members in the nation’s capital.
The White House posted a video Wednesday evening in which Trump called the shooting an “act of hatred,” and noted the alleged suspect, identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national, was among hundreds flown to the U.S. during and after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 during the Biden administration.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted on X that the suspect entered the U.S. “under Operation Allies Welcome on September 8, 2021.” It wasn’t clear whether the flight was part of the evacuation or resettlement process. Officials have confirmed Lakanwal worked for the CIA and the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
Trump railed against immigrants and those fleeing war-torn countries, calling for the reexamination of all Afghan immigrants admitted under Biden.
“This attack underscores the greatest national security threat facing our nation,” he said. “The last administration let in 20 million unknown and unvetted foreigners from all over the world, from places that you don’t even want to know about. No country can tolerate such a risk to our very survival.”
“We must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country, who does not belong here, or add benefit to our country. If they can’t love our country we don’t want them,” he added.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Wednesday evening that it had paused immigration applications from Afghans.
“Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols,” the agency said in an X post.
While Trump was quick to blame Biden, Lakanwal applied for asylum in 2024 and was granted asylum in April 2025, under Trump’s second administration.
Groups that have supported Afghan nationals pushed back against the administration’s actions.
Richard Bennett, the U.N. special Rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, said Thursday that “the perpetrator should face accountability but the entire Afghan community must not be punished due to the actions of one individual.”
“That would be terribly unjust and complete nonsense,” he said.
Shawn VanDiver, the president of Afghan Evac, an organization that helps Afghans immigrate, also condemned the suspect but called on leaders to “not demonize the Afghan community for the deranged choice this person made.”
“Afghan immigrants and wartime allies who resettle in the United States undergo some of the most extensive security vetting of any population entering the country,” he said in a statement.
The president on Wednesday night went on to attack Somalis living in Minnesota, which comes in the wake of his decision to once again attempt to terminate temporary protected status (TPS) for Somalis living in the state.
“An example is Minnesota, where hundreds of thousands of Somalians are ripping off our country and ripping apart that once great state. Billions of dollars are lost and gangs of Somalians come from a country that doesn’t even have a government, no laws, no water, no military, no nothing as their representatives in our country preach to us about our Constitution and how our country is no good,” Trump alleged.
“We’re not going to put up with these kind of assaults on law and order by people who shouldn’t even be in our country,” he added.
In the past, Democrats and immigration advocates have pushed back against the president’s immigration restrictions, including on asylum seekers, contending that he has exaggerated national security concerns and turned away millions of families in need.
“It’s not surprising that the President has chosen to broadly target an entire community. This is what he does to change the subject,” Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz said in a social media post this week after Trump announced he was ending TPS protections for Somali nationals.
(WASHINGTON) — The shooting of two National Guard personnel allegedly by an Afghan refugee in a bustling downtown neighborhood in Washington, D.C., has reopened a debate over a Biden-era program that rushed to resettle thousands of Afghans who had worked with the U.S. government during its 20-year war in Afghanistan.
The Biden administration brought some 76,000 Afghan refugees to the U.S. in 2021, according to a report at the time by the Department of Homeland Security. It’s likely that the suspect officials have identified, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was one of only 3,300 of those refugees that year who were granted a “special immigrant visa,” a document that would have expedited his entry because of his employment with the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. agencies.
Officials say Lakanwal came to the U.S. from Afghanistan in 2021 during the Biden administration and applied for asylum in 2024. According to three law enforcement sources, Lakanwal was granted asylum in April 2025 under President Donald Trump.
FBI Director Kash Patel said in a news conference Thursday morning that the Biden administration did “absolutely zero vetting” of the refugees.
That isn’t accurate, though some questions remain around how thorough the vetting process would have been for Lakanwal in 2021 and again this year when the Trump administration granted him asylum.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the suspect had worked with the CIA during the war — an arrangement that would have almost certain required him to be vetted by the agency at the time.
It’s also likely he was vetted before being granted asylum this year. According to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, there have been 8,000 such individuals since Trump took office. Noem and Patel have both suggested in recent congressional testimony that the administration had carefully scrutinized all of them.
“During my tenure, we are going through the databases to make sure that no known or suspected terrorists enter this country to harm our nation,” Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee in September.
In 2021, Alejandro Mayorkas, then President Joe Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, insisted in a document to Congress that all Afghans were vetted before entering the U.S.
“Prior to entering the United States, Afghan evacuees must successfully complete a rigorous and multi-layered screening and vetting process that includes biometric and biographic screenings conducted by intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals from multiple federal agencies,” he wrote in a 2021 briefing on the program.
The question is how comprehensive that vetting was, considering the rush to settle Afghans who were hastily airlifted to Doha, Qatar, and Europe in the wake of the chaotic U.S. troop withdrawal. Shortly after U.S. troops left Afghanistan, the government in Kabul collapsed and the Taliban took control.
FBI and other U.S. officials have warned for years that vetting refugees from certain war-town countries can be difficult when the U.S. has limited capabilities to gather intelligence in those countries.
According to a New York Times report, the process of resettling Afghan refugees spurred a humanitarian crisis in Doha as refugees packed into airport hangars and tents at a military base there. Flight manifests were at times incomplete or missing, visa or citizenship status was unknown, and there was a lack of demographic data, the Times reported.
Biden administration officials defended the program at the time as a moral imperative, providing protection to Afghans who would have otherwise been killed by the Taliban for cooperating with Americans during the war.
Anti-immigrant conservatives seized on the idea of resettling tens of thousands of desperate Afghans in a matter of months as dangerous.
“Just because an Afghan works with us, and is friends with us, does not actually mean they are safe to bring here,” Sean Parnell, now the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in 2021.
Advocacy groups say there’s no evidence that the vetting process failed.
AfghanEvac, which works to resettle Afghan refugees who helped the U.S. government during the war, said the immigrants undergo some of the most extensive security vetting of any population in the U.S.
“This individual’s isolated and violent act should not be used as an excuse to define or diminish an entire community,” AfghanEvac President Shawn VanDiver said in a statement.
